Announcing Google Insights for Search — In June, we updated Google Trends with numbers and the ability to download results to a spreadsheet. We received a lot of great feedback from agencies and advertisers on how they're using the new version; from identifying new growth markets to optimizing their Google AdWords campaigns.

Google Expands Trend Tracking With “Insights For Search” — Google has just written a blog post introducing “Insights for Search”, an extension to its Google Trends and AdWords products that allows users to track keywords across different verticals, geographic locations, and time periods.

Bewkes confirms AOL split — Time Warner will indeed split its AOL access and media units starting next year, CEO Jeff Bewkes confirmed in a release announcing the company's second-quarter earnings. — It's the first time the executive has confirmed the split, though it's been widely talked about for months.

Should You Pay Twice as Much for a Mac? — [Editor's Note: This is companion to another post at Microsoft Watch telling a different story from the same NPD data.] — On Saturday, I got to wondering about Mac versus Windows PC pricing after seeing two HP notebooks on sale at the local Target.

EXCLUSIVE: BlackBerry 8220 - Pictures of Red Kickstart — While these are images from the upcoming BlackBerry 8220 device simulator, these images show what the red-colored BlackBerry flip-phone will look like. This device is starting to look better and better since the first leaked pictures surfaced …

When Google Owns You — Nick Saber isn't happy now. Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn't get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn't get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked.

Google Finally Launches MP3 Search in China — So finally, the much talked about Google MP3 Search service is here at www.google.cn/music — And it's certainly game on as they take on Baidu's very illegal mp3 search with legal links from its search results provided by local music service Top 100.cn …

Debunking Common Windows Performance Tweaking Myths — As a tech writer, one of my biggest pet peeves is the plethora of bad advice littered across almost every web site dedicated to system tweaking. Besides the tweaks that simply don't work, some of them will actually cause your computer to run even slower—or worse.

The First $1000 iPhone Application — iPhone developer Armin Heinrich has released an application for the iPhone with two noteworthy characteristics: — 1) Its primary function is to display a handsome glowing red jewel on your iPhone's screen: — 2) It sells on Apple's App Store for $999.99 …

Comcast Buys DailyCandy For $125 Million* — As previously reported, Comcast (CMCSA) was indeed interested in buying DailyCandy. But they ended up paying much more than the $75 million we head about earlier this month — the cable company is paying Bob Pittman's Pilot Group Ventures $125 million …

Venture capital investing: What's next? — For the past two years, venture capitalists have been betting on social media start-ups with an enthusiasm reminiscent of the dot-com heyday. — Now that the economic downturn has somewhat cooled early stage investing, some venture capitalists …

LinuxWorld 2008 - nobody cares — There are certain phrases that we tend to hear a lot from vendors — ‘enterprise-class, best of breed, customer choice,’ etc. However, I was repeatedly hearing somewhat surprising phrases as I made the rounds at LinuxWorld this year: 'We don't care, customers don't care, no one cares ..."